By Mitchell Mylius
Heytham Ali won the Inter-Club Council chair position Sept. 18, 2015. He took the election in a landslide ahead of his competitors Catherine Shearer and Angela-Gussi Toledo according to the poll announcement in the ICC meeting Friday.
Ali entered the race Sept. 8, 2015 and along with his competitors, they were told that campaigning was going to start in three days. And with that, voting started as well.
While the other candidates took to the bulletin boards with flyers. Ali had a different approach.
“I drove around school in a little kids car covered in the flyers I made for my campaign,” said Ali chuckling, “It was the funniest thing.”
Heytham Ali, 20, poised in front of his campaign mobile Wednesday, 9 2015. Ali drove around
in a pink, kid-size jeep with his promotional posters in the windshield to campaign for ICC chair.
Last semester, the election was held for three positions and voting access was made easy for students walking by the 1600 building. Student Government of LPC had two computers setup on the voting site for that election. This election, no computers were set-up for students. Instead students were encouraged to vote online on their own time .
Ali explained that he had his phone ready on the voting site, handing it to students to get involved and vote. That strategy got him the chair, however, he was concerned with how the voting was handled this semester. He won with a grand total of 92 votes according to the ICC poll announcement Friday. And on a campus of more than 10,000 students, Ali doesn’t blame ignorance in the students.
“People had no idea how to vote,” said Ali, “And that was one of the biggest problems for the election for ICC chair this semester.”
“You have to make it easy for the students.”
Ali explained that his Russian propaganda approach to campaigning was what had got the voter’s attention. He created several different flyers with meme inspired themes. Photoshop was his main tool for the artwork.
He created a flyer with inspiration taken from Barrack Obama’s “Hope” campaign. Blue and red in color with some Ray-Ban glasses to make it original.
“I also had this one flyer you might have seen,” said Ali, “It says ‘Vote For Heytham, you don’t care anyway!'”
Ali claimed there is a $25,000 dollar funding for the Inter-Club Council this semester. With his new position, he wants to inform the clubs and encourage them to use this funding.